The tomato plants came from a retired couple that I met on my town’s bike trail. They have gotten to know me and my big husky over the years, and every year around this time, Lou comes through with a couple of tomato plants. Sometimes Brandywines, sometimes cherries, this year a couple of patios. They often come with a lovely note and they ALWAYS come with biscuits for the dogs. This year, this gift is extra sweet, because Lou and Buddy and I haven’t run into each other in months. Buddy has had some skin surgery that has kept him out of the sun and Lou has had surgery herself, and the last time we met on the bike trail, she said she hadn’t had time to seed any tomatoes. So I now have a burning need to get my own floppy seedlings securely potted in deeper containers so I can take a Brandywine over to Lou and Buddy.

Last year the gift tomatoes had to compete for space and light with the Zucchini That Ate St. Louis, so the yield was small, but oh, so delicious:

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Without much time to preserve or even consume this bounty, I made a very small batch of tomato jam (cinnamon, poblanos, a dash of brown sugar). As summer wore on, time became even shorter, and in September I started just smacking tomato halves drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with herbs onto a hot barbecue grill and then sliding them into freezer containers. That winter we had a lot of pizza parties, and we’d pile the tomatoes and some chevre and some basil on a pizza crust and call it dinner. And it was such a joy, such a gift, when my best friend made the happy-gourmet face over something I just pulled out of the freezer, something that came from my garden. But then, her husband had built me the gift of the raised beds in which I grew the tomatoes. My friend Julie helped me move the soil into them. My sister gave me the grill. And Bo the greedy biscuit-mooching husky secured for me the gift of Lou and Buddy’s friendship, which might not have happened if the dog did not have a steel-trap memory for anyone who has ever fed him or if Buddy didn’t have a soft spot for canine antics. Bo himself was a gift from my vet; my love of dogs, a gift from my parents. When I ponder all this I feel wrapped in a web of gifts as strong and eternal as the cycle from seed to plant to fruit to seed, blessed beyond belief.

And then I think, it’s time to pay the universe back a little.

Plant a Row for the Hungry does just that. It connects food gardeners, who often produce more than they can use or give away, with food banks in their communities. In case you’ve been living under a flower pot lately, it’s rough out there. People are losing jobs, losing homes, losing hope. Many food banks are seeing a 20 percent increase in community need — and a drop in donations or funding. That means they can’t help people who need it.

So let’s see, I can dedicate a row of peas and a row of chard, and … a fifth of whatever tomato/tomatillos get planted out. What are you willing to give? C’mon, Colorado, are you going to let ILLINOIS outshine you? Can you believe the pounds of produce those Cubs-loving flatlanders donated? (I have lots of relatives in the Land of Lincoln, including my Uncle Vernon, the heirloom tomato guru of Bloomington. And if you’re reading, Uncle V., yes, it’s a challenge.)

Tell me what you can give, and I’ll keep a virtual tally here on this blog. There’s not a lot we can do as individuals about food riots in Somalia, or the coming rice crisis in Myanmar. But we can do something about hunger where we live. We can get fresh produce to people who, without us, might have to make do on tinned tuna and canned soup in the midst of summer’s bounty. We can tell them, “you deserve better than that, no matter why you’re here.” We can share our gardens’ abundant gifts.

Tell me when you decide what you’re going to donate, how your garden’s producing and how many pounds you’ve got when you take it to your local food bank. To find out which institutions can accept fresh produce, ask your city administration; your church is another good source. Or start your own Plant a Row campaign if there isn’t yet one in your community.

Dirt Dates: The Denver Botanic Gardens is having its annual Plant Sale starting Friday, May 9, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. (members only 8:30-10 a.m.) and Saturday, May 10 from 10 a.m.-4 p.m. (members only 8:30-10 a.m.). Sayeth the Gardens: “The theme for the 2008 Sale is “Urban Nature” and will feature a variety of options on how to incorporate urban living into your own scenery, whether you have a small garden or no garden at all.” More deets here.

Next weekend, it’s Boulder County’s Ginormous Plant Sale, Saturday and Sunday, May 17 and 18, 8:30-4 p.m. at the corner of Broadway and Iris in Boulder. The proceeds benefit Growing Gardens and the Master Gardener program of Boulder County. More here.

As you’re driving around this month, keep an eye out for smaller plant sales at community colleges and co-ops. Sometimes they’re not big or well-publicized; I stumbled on a tiny one just last weekend and vowed to return to nab some great-looking pepper plants in varieties I didn’t seed this year. If you buy veggies from nonprofits, then donate some of your harvest, you keep the wheel of gifts turning two ways.

Another first of the season: the first night I turned off of I-25 sooner than usual on my way home from work. (If you drive that river of asphalt north, you know what they’ve been doing to it and the less said about that, the better.) As the interstate narrowed to one lane, I turned off on a frontage road and rolled the windows down to smell the air. The sun had finally faded. Everything around me was bathed in silvery blue as it reflected the last rays the sun had blazed before tucking itself behind the ridge. I stopped at a railroad crossing to listen for trains, or so I told myself, but it was really to gape at the view under the underpass, the almost imperceptible line between gray fields and blue foothills paling before my eyes.

And the fragrance of a spring night … when will computers be able to paste that into a file? After a sunny day, our Front Range air is usually too cold and thin and dry to hold a scent. But tonight, after a cloudy evening — ah, the aroma of disced earth and cut grass and water-filled ditch and only the faintest whiff of manure … all of it astonishingly free of any taint of diesel. Was there a tease of rain as well, or was I imagining it after reading the forecast? Weeks ago, the first big bug splatted on my windshield. Tonight, the first moth flitted by.

Friends and co-workers pity my commute, wonder why I live up here. But it has its joys. Windows down, the soothing scent of fields of grass bathing my face … that’s one.

Right. Back to reading about gardening: Marvelous book, “This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader,” by Joan Dye Gussow. Published in 2001, this could be the locavore predecessor to Barbara Kingsolver’s “Vegetable, Animal, Miracle.” (Kingsolver actually blurbs Gussow’s book on the cover). Gussow and her painter husband, Alan, always gardened, but began in the 1970s to seriously consider growing ALL of their vegetables themselves — year-round, in New York. And we whine about OUR short growing season! After 30 or 40 years in a 13-room Victorian where vegetables struggled in the shade of huge trees (but they had a killer root cellar in which to store them) they buy, as they near their 70th decade, a 150-year-old house in Pierpont, with a back yard that runs all the way to the Hudson River. Misadventures with the house ensue, and I would never want to put spoilers about what happens with THAT in my blog. Let’s just say “150-year-old salt hay for ceiling insulation.” And oh, a little bit of flooding. But … their new property had room for TWENTY 15×3-foot VEGETABLE BEDS! SO enviable! (Well … except for that flooding thing.)

And if you want to age gracefully? Check the photo of Gussow on the book’s cover: wide grin, a fat bunch of beets in her fist, and how about them biceps! The hell with “gracefully”; let’s age with MUSCLE!

In the midst of telling the story of their new property, Gussow interjects recipes and recounts the birth of the local food movement — along with carrot-thieving neighbors, architects who don’t listen and kitchen gardening as a matter of moral responsibility. Becoming engrossed in this book has been facilitating my denial about how tall, leggy, and floppy my tomato and tomatillo seedlings have gotten and the fact that I’ve been meaning to start a second batch of seedlings (eggplant, melon, basil, zukes, leeks) but can’t quite face it yet.

I got my copy of Gussow’s book at the Denver Public Library, which actually also has a few copies of Kingsolver’s book that are NOT checked out. Good luck if you want it on audio CD, though; you can get in line behind me, and I’m No. 29 on the holds list. If you have a NON-iPod MP3 player and a Denver Public Library membership, you can download the audio version of Kingsolver’s locavore manifesto for free; to learn more about how, begin here.

Just in case you want to listen to something other than the wind rushing into your car windows on YOUR commute.

Holy … How does a gardener get THROUGH this time of year? There was no post last week. I claim technical difficulties; technically, I felt like a walking swollen gland. There is an unbelievable amount of stuff to be done. The seedlings, far from allowing me to arse up their early stages, germinated at an unbelievable rate, especially the Stupice tomatoes.
(Next year, maybe I won’t be so Stupice as to plant so many seeds in each pot).

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And I’ll know that, for every inch of space of tiny seedling cells, I’m going to need three times as much space in grow lights once they start to grow up. Heck, maybe four times. The purple tomatillo seedlings are singing “Feed me, Seymour.” Except, oh yeah, there IS no Seymour, only me, and I nearly forgot to fertilize them last weekend.

Will I get time to plant a second flat of seedlings, this one for the eggplants and leeks and some more peppers and chard and melons? Can I find the time/space/light?

There is the ornamental grass to finally cut back so it can zoom upward again. There’s turf to mow and rake and have core cultivated (my aerator guy seems to have forgotten me.) There’s a date with destiny and my not-yet-purchased Cute Neuton. And yes, I forgot, thistles and dandelion to pull. Funny how I forget them.

There’s a landscape plan for my mud-wallow dog-racecourse of a back yard to work on setting up. This professionally designed rearrangement of my little universe is so beautiful it makes my head hurt. So there are plant choices from the plan (“Summer Wine” Ninebark! “Princess Kay” Plum! “Coral Canyon” Twinspur”! “Sunrise Sunset” Rose!) to google and analyze and salivate over. It’s a good thing this sore throat I’m nursing comes with a superabundance of spit, because these plants I don’t even own yet are so gorgeous I could die of dehydration sitting here at my computer.

And then there’s the lettuce bed. FINALLY germinating. Growing pretty dang slow through all these cold nights and bouts with snow. Peas: pouting. Chard: I can finally see a few poking up. Radishes: Only three or four of the two dozen I planted, as the envelope said, “here and there.” But am I capable of standing out in the cold staring endlessly at these tiny things, as if I could WILL them to send roots out through that cold chilly clay? Yes I am. Obsessed enough to stand out in the dark and sleet tucking a space blanket around those tiny things that may never amount to so much as a single morsel to eat.

Beauty is sustenance; sustenance is beauty. Is that what this fanfare of spring is trying to tell me? Anyone out there, what’s it telling you? What’s your secret for warping time in April to get all of your garden’s needs and desires fulfilled — and still have time for that most important task of all …

But first, we bring you this “has she arsed it up yet” update: No, not yet. The trays of seedlings mentioned in my last post have their own light, their own heat, and their own fan to gently blow on them so they get accustomed to the Colorado gales. If they ask for diaper changes and private school I’m drawing the freaking line.

Thank you, commenters, for parsing the arsing with me. As of right now, at 10 days out, the champion germinator is the Stupice (pronounced STEW-pitch) tomato. Had I known what those seeds could do, I’d only have put one in each jiffy pot. As it is, one of the seedlings I culled tried to re-root itself to the peat! Some of everything has come up with the exception of poblano pepper seeds that I saved from an organic grocery pepper. They remain oblivious to my obsessing.

But back to the “zipper effect” — a term CSU horticulture and landscape architecture professor David Whiting talks about and illustrates in his talks to CSU Extension Master Gardener Volunteers. Have you ever gazed at James Lileks’ Gallery of Regrettable Food (http://www.lileks.com/institute/gallery/index.html) on the web? (yes, you make break to go there now. Come right back, though, or my overlords will scold me). I suspect David Whiting has a Gallery of Regrettable Landscaping lurking within his photo collection. If you ever have the chance to hear him speak, don’t miss it. He’s inspiring, informative, funny, and he crafts his talks with as much care as I imagine he crafts his gardens.

The “zipper effect” he describes happens when you alternate the same two plants along any pathway — and it’s usually boring, over-used plant material into the bargain. For example, along the west side of my house, I have potentilla, sticker bush, potentilla, sticker bush, potentilla, sticker bush. (Forgive me for not knowing the species of sticker bush. It’s a low, spreading thing that isn’t that stickery unless a branch of it dries up, but other than being some form of plant material and tolerating the sun and heat, has little to recommend it. Ah, yes, the “it came with the house” excuse…)

According to David, alternating plant material encourages people to speed up, move along, nothing to see here, this is NOT the landscape you’re looking for. And darned if he isn’t right: My terrier mix thinks that western side of the yard is her personal racetrack. Then again, it could be the dog, not the shrubs. Hmmm…

Alongside Wilson Avenue in Loveland, south of First Street, you can see the same principle in the landscaping that fronts the busy arterial street: Deciduous tree, juniper, deciduous, juniper, deciduous, juniper. It looks as though the deciduous trees at least got good care in their youth: I can see lots of pruning sites that are small and completely healed over. The junipers, however, which may be Wichita Blues, are in sad shape. Many have split at the base or lost branches during snowstorms or are just spreading too wide for their spaces; one has outright died. They’re not much to look at now, with the alternating deciduous trees so barren. But if they do exert a “zipper effect,” that could account for all of the speeding that happens on Wilson. Just a thought.

Got zipper effect or other regrettable landscaping in your neighborhood? E-mail me it to me at sclotfelter@denverpost.com. Let’s give the Lileks site a run for its Jell-O.

Susan Clotfelter has always played in the dirt, but got dragged into gardening as an obsession when she reclaimed her hell corner: a weed-infested patch of clay inhabited by one tough, lonely lilac and a thicket of weeds. Along with training as a Colorado State University Extension Master Gardener volunteer, she dug deeper with beds of herbs and lettuce at her home and rows of vegetables wherever she could borrow land. She writes for The Denver Post and other publications and appears on community radio.

Julie's passion for gardening began in spring of 2000 when she bought a fixer-upper in Denver's Park Hill neighborhood, and realized that the landsape was in desperate need of some TLC. During the drought of 2003, she decided to give up on bluegrass and xeriscape her front yard. She wrote about the journey in the Rocky Mountain News, in a series called Mud, Sweat & Tears: A Xeriscape story. Julie is an avid veggie gardener as well as a seasoned water gardener.